But David, however, hadn't heard my instructions nor noticed us pulling back, and stood there over near the corner warehouse, firing his bow again and again. One, and then another Skel fell as they charged him, but then three of the brutes, two obese males and one lithe female, reached him and swung their clubs at him. David tried to block their attacks with his bow, but they smashed it from his hands. Stumbling backwards in fear, he raised his left arm in an attempt to ward off the blows, but the Skel hewed his outstretched arm first with a baseball bat, and then a steel rod, breaking it in I don't know how many places. And then David was down, his face contorted in agony.
All of this had happened so quickly I hadn't a chance to react, but even now, as I turned and sighted an arrow at David's three attackers, knowing I'd be too late, an arrow suddenly whooshed in from the dark and struck one Skel in the collarbone, sending him tumbling back. Another arrow hit the Skel female in the stomach, putting her down.
And then, out of the darkness came Leigh, running full bore towards the final Skel who stood over David, intent on crushing his skull with his pickaxe.
"Get away from him!" Leigh shrieked with animal-like fury as he slashed away at the Skel with his bow.
I knew Leigh wouldn't last more than a heartbeat against the Skel, so I fired my arrow at the barbarian. I missed his neck, but it hit him in the shoulder and penetrated so deeply that the Skel fell back screaming in pain as he tried ineffectually to pluck it out with his other hand.
Leigh, meanwhile, slung his bow, took David by the armpits and quickly dragged him away from the warehouses and the swirling melee.
Touched to see Leigh going to such lengths to save and care for David, I turned back to the rest of the Skel, and then watched in stunned amazement as Nanako calmly shot them down one after the other. Shorty was helping too, but with nowhere near the accuracy or speed.
All the same, there were still too many of them, and I reckoned several would reach Nanako before she could shoot them.
Terrified for her safety, I fired the arrow notched to my bowstring, dropping one of the charging Skel, and then whipped out my combat knife and yelling at the top of my lungs, charged straight at them. Fighting Skel in hand-to-hand combat was something I'd vowed I'd never do, but if I was to have even the slightest chance of saving Nanako, this was the only way.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Skel noticed me charging at them from the side, so the three closest to me turned from Nanako and came at me instead.
The first swung a nail-studded iron bar at me, but I jumped forward into the blow, striking his left wrist with an open-handed block. I followed this up by plunging my knife to the hilt in his chest, marvelling how much easier it was to kill them when they weren’t encased in their bulletproof suits of bone armour.
The next two Skel came at me then, but I skipped around them to my right, so that one blocked the other’s access to me. But even then, I ignored them both, choosing instead to leap backwards and land behind the pair of Skel who were trying to take down Nanako, who had only one arrow left.
"Run!" I yelled at her as I slashed my knife across the back of the neck of a short but extremely muscular Skel who was trying to hit Nanako with great swings of a rusty, two-handed axe. He collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
"Look out!" Nanako cried out in alarm, pointing behind me.
Aware of movement behind, I ducked down, and just in time too, for a pickaxe swung right through the space my head had occupied only a moment before. But before I could strike back at the Skel, his buddy booted me in the chest and sent me flying backwards to land on my butt. Smelling success, those two monsters cursed like troopers and moved in to finish me off.
"No!" Nanako screamed when she saw my predicament. She was safe now, having managed to put down the last Skel who’d been trying to catch her.
I rolled to my right, and back to my left, in frantic attempts to dodge the duo of weapons being swung at my head. As I blocked the next blow with my knife, I knew I had only seconds left before they took me out. Nanako was running towards us, ready to use her bow as a club now that she was out of arrows. But she wouldn’t be able to save me.
As I kept trying to dodge and avoid the rain of blows, I reflected joyously on the fact that Nanako was watching over me and still cared for me. In a stupid, moronic kind of way, I kinda feared that she hated me now. How dumb was that? I mean, she’d told me before that it was normal for husbands and wives to fight; it’s just that my parents never did
Returning my focus back to the fight, I glanced frantically about for Shorty, wondering if he’d be able to help, but no, he’d fled to the top of a large stack of pallets and was shooting arrow after arrow at two burly Skel who, lacking his dexterity, were finding it rather difficult to climb up after him.
A baseball bat struck my left shoulder. I twisted around and tried to ride the blow, but waves of intense pain shot through my arm nonetheless, and I collapsed on the concrete, no longer able to dodge their attacks.
That would’ve been the end of me, except a gunshot rang out and the closest Skel keeled over with a hole in his forehead. The second Skel looked around in surprise, but then collapsed when another bullet hit him in the chest.
I rolled over and regained my feet just in time to see Madison coming down the driveway that led into the warehouses, armed with a Skel bolt-action rifle and wearing two ammo belts full of bullets crossed over her chest. I wanted to both throttle and thank her, but concluded I’d better thank her first, then throttle her.
Madison, however, completely ignored me and with two more precision shots, put down the Skel who were trying to catch Shorty.
Everything was still after that. Not quiet, though, for the resins warehouse was blazing out of control, and the fire was continuing to spread to the neighbouring warehouses.
"Are you hurt?" Nanako asked as she hurried towards me.
"I'm fine," I lied – well – exaggerated, for my shoulder and ribs throbbed unmercifully, but nothing was broken.
"We have to get out of here – more Skel could arrive at any moment," Nanako said as she joined me, but then she caught sight of the slaves surrounding us, and her voice caught in her throat.
The slaves, who'd presumably been turned out of their nightly quarters by Madison, were a sorry sight. There were several dozen of them and they looked even more sickly than usual in the yellow fire light. Worse, some had been killed and a further dozen wounded by the Skel. And now that the battle was over, those who'd been crouching or lying down regained their feet to check on their fallen comrades, while those who'd attempted to get away from the conflict were slowly making their way back.
I heard Shorty jump down from the stack of pallets, so I turned to him. "Check on David and Leigh, can ya?"
"On it," he said, and rushed off in the direction we’d last seen them.
"Job well done, I’d say," Madison said cockily as she sauntered over to us.
"Job well done? Can't you see what you've done, Madison?" I hissed at her.
"I did what had to be done."
"You got a bunch of slaves killed, and almost all of us as well, you stupid moron," I growled, looking down into her smug, smoke smudged face.
"The Skel won't be able to set any more booby traps or make their bullet-proof armour – that's worth any price, don't you think?"
I wanted to refute her comment, but it made sense at an ugly, truth-laden level.
But a voice far angrier than mine suddenly rang out, louder even than the crackling, voracious fire. "You fools – do you know what you've done?"
I turned and saw Beth hobbling towards us, and to say that she was livid was putting it mildly. Jack, her brother, was sitting on the road several paces behind her, cradling a broken arm. I wanted to reply that this was all Madison's doing, but as far as they were concerned, she was one of us. And they'd be right.
"You've gone and killed us all; that's what," she continued. "The Skel will blame us for this and wi
ll kill us all!"
I looked at her furious, dirty face, then at Jack, staring at us through pain filled eyes, and an idea sprang unbidden to my mind.
"Hey," I asked as I took a step closer to Beth, "some of you guys were brought here by the Rangers, yeah?"
Beth just stared at me, as though unable to comprehend what I was saying, so I stepped past her and hurried over to kneel down beside Jack, and asked him the same question. "You said some of you were brought here by the Rangers, yeah?"
"'Bout half of us, including me and my sister," he replied.
I glanced up at Nanako and then turned back to Jack. "Do any of those trucks work and if so, are they fuelled up?" I asked, pointing to the rows of beat up trucks lined up in the area between the warehouses.
"Yes and yes. Why? What are you getting at?"
"If we were to take all you guys to Inverloch, would you be willing to testify against the Rangers?"
"Just so they can kill us instead of the Skel? No thanks!" Beth spat.
"Pipe down, Beth," Jack said, and then to me, "Yes, a most definite yes. But you gotta take us all – all of us here. You understand me? You can't take some and leave the rest."
"Can you drive a truck, Nana-chan?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"Okay, that leaves only me, Shorty and Leigh. Right, let's get everybody here loaded up into three trucks and then the blazes out of here and go straight to Inverloch."
"Okay, but we gotta do it quickly!" Nanako agreed emphatically.
And with that, we fell into a flurry of frantic activity. First, I found Leigh and Shorty, who'd just finished making a splint and sling for David's badly broken arm, using a stick they’d found and Leigh’s jacket, and brought them back with me. Next Shorty, Leigh and I went through the trucks and selected three that were fully fuelled up – this I determined by physically knocking on their fuel tanks and listening to the sound. I also slashed one front tire on the rest of the trucks, and then with much grinding of gears and backfiring, we drove the three chosen trucks out of the yard and into the street outside. That done, we helped David into the cab of the second truck, where he sank into the seat while moaning in pain as held to his broken arm.
That these trucks still ran was testament to the slaves who maintained them, but wow, were they piles of junk or what? The seat covers had long since perished and had been replaced by sheepskin, the windows were all gone, and the dashboard lights had perished aeons ago.
While we were doing this, Nanako retrieved all of our spent arrows by plucking them out of the slain Skel – a task that would have turned my stomach, but she managed it, somehow – and then handed the arrows back around so that our quivers were full again.
Madison interrupted the flurry of activity momentarily by grabbing Leigh by the arm. "Finally decided to grow a backbone, eh? I overheard David telling Shorty how you saved him."
"Whatever!" Leigh replied angrily, shaking off her hand.
Then, while Madison went on sentry duty behind a collapsed brick wall to watch out for more Skel, we began the slow and difficult process of helping the slaves into the backs of the trucks, leaving the wounded until last. Not surprisingly, none elected to stay behind. And the slaves, they were just skin and bones; they barely weighed anything. All the same, it was still difficult to hoist them into the trucks due to their lack of flexibility and the chains. These would have to be removed when we got to Inverloch; there was nothing we could do about it now.
"Jones, we got company!" Madison shouted suddenly.
"We’re going as fast as we can!" I shouted back.
"Go faster than that!" she replied, and then she began firing at targets up the road that only she could see. However, she had to manually load the gun between each shot so her rate of fire was pretty low.
The front two trucks were full, but we still had a dozen slaves to help into the last truck, including Jack and Beth, who insisted on getting on last in order to make sure we didn’t leave anyone behind, when a bullet suddenly ricocheted off the back of the truck, missing my head by inches. I ducked down by instinct, and then cried out in horror when the next bullet hit a middle-aged slave in the back.
‘Madison!" I yelled, "Take out that shooter!"
"I am trying," she shouted back while snapping off another shot.
I helped a teenage girl get onto the truck, and then turned and shouted with flash sonar so I could see up the street, and got a most unpleasant shock. For there were at least two dozen Skel skulking down both sides of the street towards us, some with rifles, the rest with clubs. They were darting from cover to cover, exposing themselves only briefly while they came ever closer. And in their midst strode one cocky, fearless Skel who was wearing his bone armour suit. An involuntary shudder passed through me when I realised it was Ram-Horns, and that he was directing the rest of them, driving them to get to grips with us as soon as they could.
But they weren’t having a field day, ‘cause Madison was picking the careless ones off when they made their mad dashes for cover. I counted seven bodies strewn on the road, marking their line of approach. I even saw Madison hit Ram-Horns twice, but the bullets just glanced off his hardened armour.
Madison suddenly pulled back from her position and ran towards us, pausing twice to shoot back at the Skel. "Come on!" she shouted in my face when she reached us. "We gotta go and we gotta go now!"
More bullets flew past, and for a moment I thought we really wouldn’t make it, but at long last, we helped Jack and Beth into the truck, a difficult feat due to Jack’s broken arm, and then there was only us.
"Hop up in the back and cover our retreat," I ordered Madison as I gave her a leg up. She scampered into the truck – which had no tailgate – lay down, and resumed firing.
"Let’s go!" Nanako said as she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me towards the lead truck with an edge of panic in her voice.
"We going?" Shorty asked as we tore past the truck he was driving. I answered him with a nod. And I gotta say, seeing someone as short as him trying to drive a six-wheel, four tonne truck was a sight to behold, and would have extracted a laugh had the circumstances not been so dire.
With bullets whizzing past us, and Madison replying in kind, Nanako and I reached our truck and were about to clamber up into the cab when I heard the unmistakable slap of a bullet hitting flesh, followed by Nanako gasping in shock, and then collapsing into my arms.
Chapter Twenty-Five
"You're hit?" I asked, panicking, as a wave of dread stronger than I'd ever felt before swept through me.
"I'm okay, quick, boost me up," she gasped through clenched teeth.
Knowing that she was anything but okay, but aware we couldn't stay out here and be shot at, I quickly manhandled her up into the cab, which caused her to scream in agony. I slid in after her and slammed the door shut. But when I reached out to take the gear stick I realised my left hand was slick with blood.
Her blood.
"Where are you..?" I began to ask, but she cut me off again.
"Just drive!"
Fortunately, the engine was still idling happily away – if it’d stalled while we were loading the slaves into the trucks, we'd be in a real jam now. So with my heart thumping away mercilessly out of concern for Nanako, I got the truck moving with a loud meshing of gears as I tried to coordinate using the clutch and accelerator. I could drive a truck, but had rarely done so.
The truck moved off agonisingly slowly at first, but we soon hit a good enough speed to leave the Skel behind. I drove us to the next corner and then hung a right, heading towards the Princes Highway. The truck only had one working headlight – the one on the left – and it pointed down and to the left, illuminating just enough of the area ahead to help me navigate around buildings that had collapsed halfway across the road or abandoned vehicles.
"Where are you hit?" I demanded more strongly.
"My left thigh," she replied with a gasp.
"The bullet?"
"Still in
my leg."
"Blast it!" I cussed. Why, oh why did this have to happen here and now, when there was absolutely nothing we could do about it? We couldn't stop for fear of being overtaken by the Skel who were no doubt chasing after us, and it would take us several hours to get to Inverloch.
"Put pressure on it," I suggested.
"Doing that!" she snapped.
"Is it bleeding badly?" I asked as I glanced at her thigh, where she was pressing her left hand against the bullet wound. Blood was seeping out from between her fingers, but it wasn't gushing out.
"No."
We reached the Princes Highway and I turned left, and then glanced over my shoulder through the hole in the back of the cab to make sure the other two trucks were still on my tail. To my relief, they were.
With one hand on the wheel, I manoeuvred around the wreck of a small hatchback car and used my other hand to pull my hoodie off over my head. I handed it to her and then gave her my combat knife. "Quick, cut a pad out of this and then tie the sleeves around your thigh." If we left this too long and she passed out, she could bleed to death.
Nanako nodded and then cut a strip from the bottom of the hoodie, folded in into an impromptu gauze pad and placed it over the wound. After that she cut off one of the sleeves and tied it around her leg. And then she sighed and slumped back in the seat, but continued to moan in pain.
"Now talk to me, I don't want you going into shock," I insisted as I nudged the truck up to fifty klicks.
"Talk about what?" she said with a trace of anger.
"About why you never told me Ken asked you to marry him."
"How do you know about that?"
"Remembered it a few days ago."
"Yet another thing you didn’t tell me."
"Sorry."
"If ya gonna keep making the same mistake, sorry’s really not cutting it, Ethan."
Forager - the Complete Six Book Series (A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Series) Page 64
